Sung Me Moonstruck
by deemn
Summary: She figures if she already did it once, a couple more times wasn't going to send her deeper into Hell. Right? MGTA


Disclaimer: Queen of Swords still belongs to Paramount and Fireworks. Still. Title taken from Sylvia Plath.

Written in response to the one word prompt, "outsides." Hell if I know how I got here.

SUNG ME MOON-STRUCK

If she has to name the moment it started, she can't. She can pretend to, but the moment of fascination, of fondness, of familiarity… no. Considering everything that's happened, every moment in time where it's been him and her and the whole wide world between them, how can she? She _can_ pinpoint the moment when it got complicated. Because that's easy—the moment when the undefined boundaries of their relationship, the lines in the precious proverbial sand, were crossed, recrossed and then smudged the hell out of existence.

She started it. She admits that. It was most definitely her fault. Because she, free, somewhat underdressed and giddy on _air_, leaned in towards him. Tempted him. Almost kissed him, just for that extra torment, before sliding her sash between his parted lips and tying it tight at the base of his skull. She stripped down to skivvies to get into his clothes, right there in the torchlight. She watched him watching her, overwhelmingly aware of their mutual awareness. And she enjoyed it.

So she definitely started it.

The rest is his fault. All his goddamn fault. Because he was stupid, cocky, arrogant, psychopathic, but everything he'd said was true. She is cocky, arrogant, a little psychopathic. She dresses in black in the desert, wears her corset on the outside and oh, yeah, secretly fights the government while still paying her taxes. Not very high up on the sane-o-meter.

Right. All his fault, because deep down they both want the same things. A good fight, a good meal, and a soft bed. And when put that way, it just makes sense to be economical. No need for four people to be fighting when two can get it done. No need for two cooks when one can do. No need for two beds when one works.

Well, not so much the last one. Because, ew, dirty and stinky. And evil, mostly. But when she broke his pistol and he threw her sword over a cliff, well, that was that. Deadlock, in the desert, in the middle of the night. With no horses, because his idiot stallion and her idiot stallion were both such goddamn _males_. So they looked at each other, and he grinned that wide-mouth grin and demanded that she leave the sash behind.

She left the sash and the corset, bitched a little about her sword. That was her second favorite. He bitched about his goddamn pistol—like he didn't have twelve others waiting in the garrison stock room—and pulled something out of his pocket. Gut instinct led to a knife at his throat and genuine surprise in his eyes. And beef jerky, wrapped in a handkerchief.

It was tough and salty and so _good_ it scared her, a little. Because taking food from the enemy is not okay, and it's not supposed to be delicious, or something as simple as beef jerky. And Grisham is also not supposed to be more prepared than she is, although the simple function of pockets somehow escaped her costume design. Downside to the jerky was that it was so salty they were both parched in less than an hour. She showed him how to cut cactus to get water, to de-spine and gnaw slowly, to gum on it, really, like a toothing baby.

When they got tired they sat and when they were exhausted they lay down, and in all that time he didn't say anything wrong, really. They didn't know how to interact without insults, but that was normal and all right. And he kept grinning that wide-mouth grin, like her sarcasm was actually appreciated.

Maybe that's what did it.

Nah.

So she fell asleep on his rolled-up jacket, and at dawn she looked at him and he looked at her and she was screwed. So he sidled over and put his hand on her belly, on the hard-maintained flatness below her navel, and kissed her.

And he's a really good kisser. Evil bastards usually are.

Eventually, she realized that her stupid idiot stallion had wandered back to her. And his stupid idiot stallion had, too, and next to each stupid idiot stallion was a mare that had to be stupider than the stupid idiot stallion. Which led to the realization that she was not much better than the stupid idiot mares, so she pushed him off, got up, got on her horse and left.

Oversimplification. She pushed him off, kissed him again, got up, kissed him some more, got on her horse and left. Because, really good kisser. And she'd already screwed up plenty that morning, so a little more wasn't going to send her deeper into Hell.

She hopes.

And then… it's been hard. Because he knows, and she knows, and in between attempts to take off her head, he says something. And she replies, because it's how they work. And the innuendo just ramps up, until she either goes home in a hot heady huff, or she escapes and sneaks back into his quarters for some quality not-sex.

Because, well, if she did it once, a couple more times wasn't that much worse.

She does set limits. There was the original never-again limit, but that went to hell when he got up close and personal and… okay, he didn't really do anything. He touched her, and she can be honest enough to acknowledge that she is just a woman and the touch of a man can sometimes do very, very serious damage. Especially when the just-woman lives a little bit like a nun, and the touching-man understands just about everything about desire.

There is the not-public limit, which isn't really a limit but more of a preservation tactic. Because they will both die if someone sees. And that's another thing. They both like being alive much more than anything else. There's the no-horizontal limit. They shot that one to hell, too. It was originally the no-bed limit, but then he laughed and simply pulled her onto the floor. So then it became the no-horizontal limit, because his body did very very bad good things when it was horizontal, and then she realized that if she was going to break her limit and be horizontal, she might as well be comfortably horizontal. So bed became okay.

She tried a no-talk limit, but he talked. A lot. It was mostly profanity but he… communicated. She actually understood the things coming out of his mouth, his anger, his resentment, his ambition. And he listened, very very hard, to the things she never thought she'd say. To anyone. They come tumbling out of her in the darkness when she stops to catch her breath and he listens, and responds, even though she's sure he can't understand. He kind of does, though. He gives her words for her frustrations: leashes, accountability, independence, freedom.

And she fell asleep, once, in the middle of a sentence, and he didn't stab her or tie her up or arrest her. He put his blanket over her, locked his door and knocked out right next to her. And that's when she knew this was getting dangerous, and it was going from something ugly like burning to something amazing like illumination.

He picked up on things, when they fought, and he got better. And she got stronger because her opponent was getting better, and because he was training her to do incredible things without air. The mask started to fit like skin and feel like silk instead of heavy and scratchy and fake. The persona became a person, who needed and wanted and _took_ like any other human being.

It isn't dramatic, not like love. They fight out their frustrations and their mutual hatreds, and then they make out, which is just another form of fighting, really. All power plays, and who can have the upper hand. Except for those moments when he makes it something more, something scary and intriguing that she flees from.

And then, when she's that other persona that's still chained up, that other persona that doesn't take because it has no right to, she baits him. Flirts harder than ever before, to watch him get flustered, to watch him stumble and look around. She finds herself grinning a wide-mouthed grin, pushing all the limits she can, being cocky and arrogant and a little psychopathic, maybe just a little bit evil.


End file.
